Page 100 of The Triangle

Lying on my back, on top of a Steinway concert grand piano, spent from the rigors of our gymnastic sex, my wilting dick in my hands… It seems like the perfect way to die. It doesn’t mean that I’m not going to work like hell to avoid dying just now, but if it must happen, I reckon I’ll be fine with it.

Fokken kak, man. This has been a shit week. But it’s also been a fokken brilliant week. We’re about to find out which one will triumph. The sun or the shitstorm.

“What the fuck?” Christine yells, as I roll off the piano top and land beside them.

“How’d they fuckin’ find us, Alec?” Danny shouts.

“Fokked if I know, man!”

Jesus, the gunfire is loud. I’ve seen war before. Seen it up close. I’ve been in some proper warzones and also some hostile environments that look like warzones, just without a formal declaration of war. And this is exactly that. Someone isn’t just trying to kill us. Someone has declared war.

I know this because not all gunfire sounds alike. I cannot explain how such a thing is possible, but it is. Some gunfire sounds clinical, unemotional. And some gunfire is filled with rage and blistering passion.

This gunfire feels very much like the second one.

“I thought the glass was bulletproof!” Christine shouts over the maelstrom of metal.

“It is!” I return.

“Yeah?” hollers Danny. “Doesn’t fuckin’ look that way, does it?”

“It’s not made of fokken unicorn dicks, man! It ain’t magic! It has its limits!”

Spying our discarded clothes on the floor, I crawl out from under the piano and retrieve my and Danny’s trousers and Christine’s sweatpants and t-shirt. My still-leaking cock sliding across the cold floor makes me a tiny bit wistful. Moments ago, it was so goddamn warm and happy. Gaan naai ’n fokken koei, man. Go fuck a fuckin’ cow. Kak.

I grind back under our sorry excuse for cover and parcel out our paltry outfits. As we slide clothes on Danny yells, “Guns!”

“No shit, bru!”

“No, motherfucker! Do you have any?”

“Ah. Right! Yeah, man. Of course! I have a whole fokken cache of them!”

A streaming river of automatic weapons fire comes flowing into the piano. Right where the three of us were enjoined in libidinous congress just moments before. It makes a horrific sound.

A lullaby for a nightmare.

“Where are they?” Christine shouts.

“What?”

“The guns, Alec! Where are the guns?”

I’m so distracted right now. Violence and death have been a part of my life for so long that I don’t process it like other people, I suppose. When you’re born into conflict, it just becomes part of your routine. Like those videos of befok soldiers you see in war zones. Those jas naaiers who just smoke cigarettes while bombs are going off all around them. It’s a conditioning. We are all animals. And we can be trained.

I have been trained to accept death as a necessary end to all. It’s where that Hulk fokker comes from. He swells and expands and makes the confrontations I’m in less appalling to deal with. He will be making himself known shortly, I imagine.

So it stands to reason that as much as I’m not chuffed to have this foolishness unfolding all about us three, I’m just as much lost in pleasure at the notion of it being us three who are stuck in the middle now. I look from Danny to Christine and back again. And I can feel myself smiling.

“Fuck are you smiling about?” Danny asks.

I love you both, I think. I’m so glad you’re here.

“Guns, Alec!” Christine again.

Oh, right.

“They’re on the other side!”